About Meadhbh

Hi! My name's Meadhbh Ginnane, I'm a senior history/art history double major from Connecticut. I've been involved with WCMA since my freshman year, and am really excited to finish my senior year with ACA!

What are two things you're interested in right now?

While I was studying abroad, I took a course on Art Repatriation and Cultural Heritage. It was a sort of watershed moment for me, that really helped me to reevaluate my interests and how I related to art history. Due to this, I started reading Chasing Aphrodite, which is about the various scandals in the 1990s and 2000s at the Getty Museum, which I really recommend if you're interested at all in museums, or just want to be completely shocked. I'm currently working on my history senior thesis, which is about representations of Joan of Arc in French cultural heritage, and how these relate to French nationalism and fear of identity loss. Joan of Arc is a really interesting figure, so I've been enjoying researching her!

What song are you most embarrassed to love?

Mr. Brightside gets A LOT of undeserved criticism. The music video is a mid-2000s masterpiece, and in 2012 The Killers released a prequel song called Miss Atomic Bomb, which is another amazing music video (it's both acted and animated, plus uses excerpts from the Mr. Brightside video, and even directly animates some of these). I also have a complicated and overly lengthy theory that their new song Caution is directly related to Mr. Brightside, but this is and will remain a conspiracy theory.

What does your cultural diet look like? Since we're mainly producing and consuming culture online these days, what websites do you most frequent? What do you do when you get there?

I've been visiting ArtNet News and the Guardian a lot. They always have really interesting cultural heritage and art restitution stories. I've become notorious among my family, friends, and professors for reading these types of stories, so I often receive emails from them with links from these websites. I've also been visiting food blogs a lot. I usually cook a lot when I'm at home, and miss it, so have been looking at blogs to get me through the rest of the semester. I've also been playing Zelda: Breath of the Wild a lot. I finished the game over the summer, but found out (while stuck in my dorm room in Williams-arrival quarantine) that there's an expansion pack, so have been working through that.